reading reflection #7
In Christensen’s book, he suggests that the future of telecommunication industry would be a market combining the wired and wireless telephony. The market includes the data transporting and add-valued services. The carrier of those services would be smart-phone. Smart-phone means the new form of personal electric products connecting internet, wireless phone, and PDA functions. People believe that the smart-phone would be the next online media in the future. The telecom networks may foster the vision of a universally-connected world by providing those services to customers. People around the world are connected by smart-phone so closely. These new services could broaden the market by bringing non-consumers to it. We may use the innovation and distribution theory to speculate that the adoption model of smart-phone or the future telecommunication services. The five steps of adoption are knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation. Customers will follow these steps to adopt the new services just like they adopted the cell phone and MP3 player devices. However, it is not a real universally-connected world until cost is reasonable. Along with these assumptions, there are difficulties that have to be overcome. The connections between wired and wireless over different countries would be an issue that needs collaborations between the services providers in different country. The high charge of the international roaming access is the reason why the cell phone failed to make the world a real universally-connected world. As long as we take the advantages from the low cost of wireless internet connection, the smart-phone could benefit the mass. There are opportunities for smart-phone to be a great global personal communication tool, and hope we can all see its success.
Questions:
1. How will the smart-phone perform its functions in the future? Why is it the next online media?
2. Please provide your personal experiences of using the internet and add-value services on cell phone? When did you use it and why did you us is?
3. What will people want to transport after we can transport text, sounds and images?
November 20, 2007 at 6:57 am
[...] Yen-Ching [...]
November 20, 2007 at 7:59 pm
You bring up an important point about cost being a barrier to the universally-connected world. If we review the pricing history of PCs (especially laptops), they became a lot cheaper over a short period of time and are now much more prevalent than a decade ago, connecting the globe via the World Wide Web. If the smart phone is the next online media of the future, will it follow the same path as PCs? I believe the rise in the popularity of the modern day PC was quite drastic. Similarly, the mobile phone developed very quickly – simple phone features, color screens, cameras, ring tones, online access, email, instant messaging, etc. Additionally, the competitive market has allowed pricing to drop. For worldwide acceptance, there needs to be a combination of global features plus reasonable pricing. As you state, there are still some compatibility discrepancies with the hardware and network access that make it difficult for some phones to work globally; however, the smart phone is starting to break those barriers and can be the catalyst to a universally-connected world.